Market Discussions

Manipulating the price of an item isn't tough provided the situation is right, but artificially keeping an item's price over or under value for long periods is difficult. As an item's price is generally set on both the value of materials needed to produce and the supply/demand ratio, there is a limit to how much manipulating you can actually do before the market breaks that bottle neck.

What I found works best with market manipulations (for fun and profit) is manipulating BOTH sides of the market. If I find there is a large gap in the buy side orders where the top order and the order under it have a large gap, I may go in and fill that top order to make a new basement price. The problem I found if I just leave it at that is that you now have a very large margin between the buy and sell orders. Sounds great but the market is eventually going to readjust to bring that margin back into normal, through over competition, aggressive competition, over manufacturing, etc and even then you never know if it's going to be the buy price increasing again (bad) or the sell price dropping (good).

If you lower the buy price to create a new basement AND lower the sell price, you have a much better chance at maintaining a reasonable margin that on the surface looks ok to the general public and keeping an artificially lower sell price for a longer period. The profits come later after you've been able to build up a stockpile of goods on that lower buy price, wait for the market to sort itself out, then sell for a much larger profit. This can be done on the sell price as well.

It really is a game of finesse. Making sure there are enough traders active so they lemming your dropping sell prices and making it not so obvious that you're trying to manipulate the market which may scare them off for a while. You want the lemmings to follow your lead then take over so you can pull your sell items out of the danger zone so to speak.

so for example: a ship normally trades at 90/100m with a 10m margin. The buy side orders has one ship buying at 90m and the next order is at 68m. I may fill that one remaing order to bring the new top buy order to 68m. The new market for the ship is 68/100m with a 32m margin. Looks awesome but it will attract a ton of traders as they get wind of the huge margins. What I would do is in addition to setting the basement to 68m also try to start a bidding war on the sell side to reduce the sell side to say around 78m giving it a 10m margin again. Keeps the majority of the traders away, looks reasonable at a glance and I can pick up inventory for a later sell (at 100m when the markets readjusts itself)

I never bothered leaving Jita, I used stock I had on hand. I've always been of the mindset of time=money and the time I spent bringing in goods from somewhere else took time away from doing what I did best...station trading.

I will say that you need to know when to cut your losses. Sometimes manipulations fail and fail hard. I got burned bad a couple years ago by while trying to shore up part of the standard implant market. During an expansion or patch, Loyalty Points from FW was not balanced properly and resulted in a pilot earning more in LP that the enemy pilot and cargo was worth. Resulting in a certain someone, *cough *cough....loading up cargo with high value goods, having a team mate blow him up and exchanging the LP for implants which he dumped on the market. I was in about 5b when I decided to walk away shaking my head, realizing something bad was happening.

The only problem is I don't have the stock lol

Indeed, right now 20, working on getting 30.

This. While I take it step further.

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1) When the margin is small but you see that demand is draining a hub, several hubs or regions. Buy out the whole market in hubs (and if affordable in isk and order slots, relist or buyout the market in whole regions). So, amplify the shortage in the market.

2) The "Time to Market" of producers will be the gab (in time and isk) that you can use to feed your now out of market stocks back into market in small portions.

3) Setup a blocking order on the old stable price level, so people sitting on out of market stocks cannot move into market without taking a loss

4) Setup buy-orders on all hubs as "hedge", so, your average buy price of your out of market stocks goes down as long as they keep being filled and the gab exists.

5) The moment producers start kicking in fresh stacks to fill the gab, you can stay well below their profit margins by feeding the market from your out of market stocks that have a value per item that is under market price due to your hedges, keep the hedges up until the moment you sold all your speculation stocks. The lower your "out of market" stack price per item is, the longer you can feed back your stocks under market price. The moment buy-orders pickup above your "low-end" sell price, cancel all hedges, dump out your remaining stocks and move on to another market.

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Once had a stack that I could feed back into market for several months, under price-level, with profit. Could have dumped out, but had enough slots to spare.

Here's how I'd manipulate the price of a medium volume item downward regionwide. I'll use Stasis Webifier II as an example, and we will assume that 'fair' price in a market hub is 1 million ISK (so buy orders around 970k, sell at 1030k or so).



Step 1 (7 days before manipulation): Set up a regionwide buy order for perhaps 200 units at a generous price. 750k will do well for our purposes. You want a lot of stock and you want it in bad locations. Check you haven't been outbid on a daily basis.

Step 2: You should now have 1 unit of stock in each of 10 or more stations. Post a buy order at 970000.01 ISK (highest but not by much) that has range limited to the hub (1J if you have to because fortizar).

Step 3: Now, sell your 1x units that you have everywhere for 970000.02 each.

Your market enemies will see a wall of 970000.02 priced items and many will undercut you - boom, selling straight to your buy order.

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Alternately skip Step 2. Now some market actor will usually undercut your wall of 970000.02 listings and another will counter-undercut.

Confirm, people are unable to read the location/jumps column while placing a reasonable sell order. One inconvenient location is usually enough to kill the price. I'm most times finding myself on the receiving end of this tactic, and buy out the cheap stock sometimes.

Oh I know, I did a little in Dodixie and Amarr.